I’m back from my hiatus. I’ll be slow catching up and
getting back into the swing of things, but it’s looking like I’m going to be
moving to a two-day-a-week schedule because reasons. I love blogging or I
wouldn’t keep coming back, but it’s time to be realistic—and the 5h!7 is
getting real as of late (more on that at a much later date).
Writing news that isn’t really news: the WIP isn’t done
because I took three weeks off (bloody pirates). Yeah, I know, I need to keep
moving forward and all, but I NEEDED those weeks. That being said, I think we’re
a week or two from the “You’re going into the stew pot” party (that’s nerd speak
for I’m almost done with the rough draft). When that’s finished I’ll probably
start waxing poetic about the novel I’ll be revising. It would appear that I
fall back in love pretty easily since all I can think about lately is the novel
I’m about to be revising (more on that after I put the pirates in the stew).
I’ve been entering contests like a mad woman, so I’m going
to take a break from those and absorb all the feedback. Even if that feedback doesn’t
go into Query Bait, I’ll keep it in mind for the next run. And speaking of
contests, here are the stats from Brenda Drake’s Adult Pitch Party!
|
Genre
|
Number Entered
|
Number of requests
|
|
Women’s Fiction
|
11
|
11
|
|
Historical Fiction
|
11
|
4
|
|
Paranormal Romance
|
5
|
3
|
|
Thriller
|
11
|
3
|
|
Urban Fantasy
|
17
|
6
|
|
Fantasy
|
10
|
1
|
|
Romance
|
20
|
31
|
|
Science Fiction
|
9
|
13
|
|
Mystery
|
7
|
9
|
|
Commercial Fiction
|
4
|
5
|
|
Total
|
108
|
95
|
|
|
|
|
|
New Adult Romance
|
6
|
7
|
|
New Adult everything else
|
15
|
7
|
|
Total
|
21
|
14
|
A few caveats: This contest leaned heavily towards romance,
and with numbers like these, we can’t really call it statistically significant.
So it looks like a really rough time to be writing fantasy, but there’s no way
to tell if the ten manuscripts were actually representative, or if they were
all unlucky in that they were really similar to the requesting agents’ lists.
Which is to say, even though these are fun, they don’t really tell us all that
much.
What I can say about contests is this: They are really good
for you, and not always for the reasons you think. Yes, the feedback and
friends are invaluable, but there’s more. There was an agent who requested my
material, and I never would have thought she’d take a second look at Sci Fi.
Nothing in her profile indicates that she does genre fiction, so for everyone
out in the query trenches: QUERY WIDELY. I would have never, ever—not in a
million years!—suspected that agent might have even the slightest interest in
that work. I’d even passed up contests where this agent was one of the judges
because I didn’t think there were enough agents in my genre to be worth my
while! How crazy is that??
Okay, enough of that. Get back out there and
write/query/revise/skip rocks across the gazing ponds of life.*
*The Get Back out there and fight is a direct quote from my
single favorite arcade game of all time, T-Mek. If you know where there’s still
a functional cabinet, let me know, I would seriously travel to play it again!
(enter arena, turn left, hit the guns)
